December 26, 2011

OAT Israel: Olive Oil Farm Lecture & Lunch

Ehud Yonay wrote "Top Guns" for California magazine (May 1983) which inspired the movie "Top Gun." Yonay also wrote "No Margin for Error, the Making of the Israeli Air Force." He kept us spellbound telling stories about his family and life as an olive oil farmer in the cooperative farming village of Kfar Hasidim. Yonay descends from a secular rebel who married the niece of a Hassidic rabbi. He seemed pleased to report that his village is half observant and half non-observant, and they all live well side-by-side.

Joan Nathan wrote in her 1996 New York Times article: "Like most Israelis who grow their own olives, the Yonays take theirs to Arab neighbors for pressing. Mr. Yonay, who owns the Greater Galilee Olive Oil Company, goes to the village of Tamra, about 15 miles north of Kfar Hasidim, where Waffik Abu Roomi operates a two-year-old steel olive press from Italy."

After the lecture, Yonay's wife demonstrated how to make pita bread and then let us make our own.

David told us that Jews born in Israel are called "Sabra" which refers to the plant we know as the "Prickly Pear" because they are prickly on the outside and delicate on the inside. Behind the prickly pears in this photo are planned and orderly Jewish settlements. Muslim towns grow more "organically."